The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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American Religion: Our Sacrament, 2

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on the pledge of allegiance:

“the Supreme Court overturned Gobitis just three years later in West Virginia StateBoard of Education v. Barnette, thus making it one of the most short-lived precedents ever.

“That does not mean that Frankfurter’s comments aren’t illustrative of a position that is (or at least was) widely shared. But it does takes the sting out of your observation that Frankfurter wrote the “majority opinion” in the case. And the point probably does deserve to be mentioned in the post, since I take the thrust of your post to be an observation on official triumphalism.”

American Religion: Religionizing conflict

Islamicists are often accused of elevating political conflicts into cosmic ones.  They can’t help “religionizing” conflict, given their pre-modern, irrational, non-secular assumptions.

Then Andrew Sullivan writes, shortly after 9/11: “What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion. . . . We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution – and the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees.  We are fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains  in religion there is [i.e., fundamentalism].  And not only our lives but our souls are at stake.”

Thus far the wild-eyed secular prophet.  Cosmic war, anyone? Will the real “religionizer” please stand up?

American Religion: Saving Us From Ourselves

Critics often complain that Supreme Court decisions have removed contentious issues from the political arena, where they can be debated and decided by citizens and their representatives.  That is, it appears, no accident.  In a 1969 article on the Harvard Law Review that was cited in several Supreme Court cases, Paul Freund argued that religious cases at least needed the finality of a court decision.

“Ordinarily I am disposed, in grey-area cases of constitutional law, to let political process function.  Even in dealing with basic guarantees I would eschew a single form of compliance and leave room for different methods of implementation, whether in pre-trial interrogation under the privilege against self-incrimination, or libel of public figures under freedom of the press, or exclusion of evidence under the search and seizure guarantee.  The religious guarantees, however, are of a different order.”

Because of the history of religious violence, these issues cannot be left to the political process, which might turn ugly.  “Although great issues of constitutional law are never settled until they are settled right, still as between open-ended, ongoing political warfare and such binding quality as judicial decisions possess, I would choose the latter in the field of God and Caesar and the public treasury.”

American Religion: Our Sacrament

In his majority opinion in the 1940 Minersville School District v. Gobitis case, which dealt with the question of whether school districts could require students to salute the American flag, Felix Frankfurter wrote: “The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.  Such a sentiment is fostered by all those agencies of the mind and spirit which may serve to gather up the traditions of a people, transmit them from generation to generation, and thereby create that continuity of a treasured common life which constitutes a civilization.  ’We live by symbols.’  The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.”

What would Tertullian do?

American Religion: Nationalism as Religion

Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle claim that nationalism is a religion.  In particular, American civil religion is a religion, sustained by violence and blood-letting, focused on the sacred “totem” of the American flag (Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)).  If so, why do we expend so much industry to deny that it’s a religion?  What interests are served by the denial?  In an article on the same theme, they answer,

“Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy things are, from what is contestable.  To concede that nationalism is a religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just the same as sectarian religion.  By explicitly denying that our national symbols and duties are sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian symbols.  In so doing, we embrace the ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god.  The god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language.  But that god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice.”

American Religion: Catholic America

William Cavanugh notes (The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict): “although Jefferson was responsible for the complete separation of church and state in Virginia, Jefferson wrote in the language of medieval Christianity about the preservation of physical things associated with the creation of the declaration: ‘Small things may, perhaps, like the relics of saints, help to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of Union.’  Of the desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson expressed his hope that we might see it ‘carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the Church.’”  Cavanaugh cites a study that shows that “throughout the nineteenth century, virulently anti-Catholic leaders were inclined to borrow Catholic imagery to describe the nation’s founding.  The founders were ‘saints,’ they raised ‘altars’ of freedom, their houses were ‘shrines’ containing ‘relics,’ and so on.”

Practices, rituals, and language that no Protestant would tolerate at church found their home in American civil religion.

American Religion: God and Caesar

An article of mine is up at the First Things web site today:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/05/newsweek-caesar-and-the-things-of-god

American Religion: Mosaic nation

A recent issue of the TLS reviews Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story, a study of the influence of Moses on the American political imagination.  Everyone from Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and the other Founders to George M.-for-Moses (so described by the Independent) Bush invoked the example of Moses.  In the revolutionary era, Deuteronomy was the most-cited book of the Bible (which was far and away the most-cited book).  Franklin and Jefferson collaborated on a Great Seal that showed Moses raising his hand to the Red Sea to drown the tyrant Pharaoh.  Spirituals composed during Southern slavery longed for redemption from the Egypt of the South and an exodus to a Canaan, and the Civil Rights movement picked up the same theme.

American Religion: Rodney Stark

For years, I’ve used Rodney Stark’s book on early Christianity in a theology class and told students that it was written by an unbeliever.  It seems that’s not quite true.  Stark grew up Lutheran, and has recently discovered that he’s again a Christian.  In a 2007 interview with the Italian Center for Studies on New Religions (Cesnur), he says:

“I have always been a ‘cultural’ Christian in that I have always been strongly committed to Western Civilization. Through most of my career, however, including when I wrote The Rise of Christianity, I was an admirer, but not a believer. I was never an atheist, but I probably could have been best described as an agnostic. As I continued to write about religion and continued to devote more attention Christian history, I found one day several years ago that I was a Christian. Consequently, I was willing to accept an appointment at Baylor University, the world’s largest Baptist university. They do not require faculty member to be Baptists (many are Catholic) and I am not one. I suppose ‘independent Christian’ is the best description of my current position.”

American Religion: Mainline’s revenge

Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal its “wider cultural triumph. . . . Liberal Protestant have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”  Smith adds, “liberal Protestantism’s core values – individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience – have come to so permeate broader American culture that its own churches as organizations have difficulty surviving.”  Try, Smith implies, running an organization centered on the values of “emancipation” and “the authority of experience.”

Smith’s own surveys of 18-24-year-old “emerging adults” supports Demerath’s claims.  His team found that “individual autonomy, unbounded tolerance, freedom from authorities, the affirmation of pluralism, the centrality of human self-consciousness, the practical value of moral religion, epistemological skepticism, and an instinctive aversion to anything ‘dogmatic’ or committed to particulars were routinely taken for granted by respondents.”  They found that “most Catholic and Jewish emerging adults . . . talked very much like classical liberal Protestants” and “evangelical Protestant and black Protestant emerging adults even talked like liberal Protestants.”

Richard Niebuhr’s 1937 description of liberalism is alive and well: “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

American Religion: Wrath of Angels

I came across a reference to James Risen and Judy L. Thomas’s 1998 Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War in a recent article in the Weekly Standard.  It’s a riveting account of the development of anti-abortion activism and extremism.  It focuses a good deal of attention on the work of Operation Rescue from the late 1980s to its fracturing in the early 1990s.  Its account of the internal squabbles in Operation Rescue makes for grim reading, and the authors conclude that the move to murdering abortion doctors in the early 1990s essentially ended activism.  It’s still around, of course, as witnessed by the recent killing of George Tiller in May of this year; by and large, pro-life activism has withered.

That may be a tragedy, a sign that evangelical activists have retreated into the soft safety of middle class America.  There’s another way to see it:  Operation Rescue launched a prophetic appeal that was ignored; the rescues made it perfectly clear that the entire system defends abortion – police, courts, the Justice Department, and not just a slight majority of the Supreme Court.  Through the protests, America was confronted with its systematic evils, and yawned.  That does not leave one sanguine about the future prospects of the American system.

American Religion: American Ironies

I don’t buy everything in Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, especially his insistence that there is no power without guilt because no exercise of power is “transcendent over interest” (Can a gift be given? Same question).  Still, the book is as relevant and important now, perhaps more so, than when it was written over a half-century ago.

Niebuhr, for instance, has a great deal of insight into the character of American religion.  He traces the easy American conflation of virtue and prosperity to stranges within Puritanism that quickly lost “religious aw before and gratitude for ‘unmerited’ mercies” and quickly turned into congratulations to “God on the virtues and ideals of the American people, which have so well merited the blessings of prosperity we enjoy.”  He quotes Tocqueville to good effect: “Not only do Americans follow religion from interest but they place in this world the interest which makes them follow it.”  Remember, this is a man who never heard of Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn.

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American Religion: Irreplaceable

Richard John Neuhaus was an irreplaceable man.  Few public intellectuals ever have expressed themselves with the same warmth, wit, and verve, and few have had the range of experience, interest and insight. How many inner city pastors could also mount a withering attack on Richard Rorty?  We will have to go through the Obama years without his help, and that is a great loss.

The uniqueness of his mind is only half of it.  He was irreplaceably placed.  President Bush wasn’t indulging post-morten politeness when he called Neuhaus his “dear friend” and counsellor, but Neuhaus had friends on the other side of the aisle as well.  Who else has counted Bush and Martin Luther King among his friends? Who else had such close associations with Popes and with Charles Colson?  

There are a lot of smart people about, but only Neuhaus could have launched First Things and made it the standard of Christian journalism that it is.  

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American Religion: American Enlightenment

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post on American priestcraft:

[1] The dichotomy, “Enlightenment or evangelical” is a bit too pat for my taste, but then I tend to squint until I see shades of gray in what others see as the most black and white of situations.

[2] On Anglicanism in colonial America: The appointment of an Anglican bishop was a big deal to the colonists, not only for “religious” reasons, but because the colonists feared that it portended English political consolidation over the colonies. (There was a big, big streak of Whiggish paranoia among wide swaths of the colonists – so I don’t know that the reaction to the Bishop’s appointment was justified or not, nonetheless, that, apparently, is how many colonists interpreted the appointment, and so opposed it.)

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American Religion: American priestcraft

Was the American Revolution inspired by the Enlightenment?  Or was it an evangelical Presbyterian rebellion?

One way to get at that would be to examine the rhetoric concerning “priestcraft” in the American revolution. More than forty years ago, Carl Bridenbaugh pointed to the importance of debates about Anglicanism in the American revolution, and perhaps examining those debates could reveal how much the American revolutionaries were indebted to Enlightenment anti-clericalism.

One also notes the anti-priestly rhetoric and impulse that lies behind many of the most characteristically American religious forms, growing out of revivalism.

At the very least, American evangelicalism and European Enlightenment have a common animus toward priestcraft.

American Religion: Pomo Mormons

Ex-Mormon Kenneth Anderson has some pointed things to say about Mormons in the December 24 issue of the Weekly Standard.  He left the Mormons because “I found I could not continue to say I believed in a religion rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which was not safely back in the mists of time in the way that protects Christian belief and worldly reason from meeting up to implode like matter and antimatter.”  That’s an odd statement: When Christianity began, after all, its historical claims were current news, with eyewitnesses running excitedly around the Mediterranean world.

Anderson has this insightful thought about Mormons, though: “The usual thing for a Mormon intellectual under such circumstances is to discover the beauty of postmodernism and its flexibility about rationality and empirical truth.”  He adds that he prefers “regular old modernity and the Enlightenment even if they don’t grant me complete freedom to believe seemingly contradictory things.”

Anderson is furious that evangelicals would refuse to vote for Romney solely on the basis of his faith, and aims some blistering curses against them, literal curses.  I’d have to check, but I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen imprecations in a news magazine.

American Religion: Americanism

David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95.

America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough.

For many, both within the U.S. and outside, America is a thoroughly religious ideal. It is, Gelernter says, the fourth of the great Western religions. It has its Creed, its sacred history, its saints, its founders and prophets, its mission. America is something to be believed.

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American Religion: Christian America

Rosenstock-Huessy again: He writes that Christian conversion always involves a break with an old way of life, a breach with old loyalties and commitments, and a “verification” of that experience by an induction into a new people, “formerly overlooked or even despised, who now enable us to strengthen experience into habit.” (There’s a bit too much of Weber in that formulation, but leave that to the side.) In a footnote, he adds: “America was practical Christianity as lon as millions of immigrants experienced a change of allegiance from an Old World to a New World, as long as tears shed in the Old World backed up as seed the harvest of joyful experiences in the New.”

American Religion: Innocent abroad

In a recent issue of TNR, Alan Wolfe reviewed David Kuo’s book telling the story of his service in the current Bush administration. Kuo worked in the office of faith-based initiatives, and though he left the administration he still praises Bush because of his Christian testimony. What strikes Wolfe most strongly about Kuo’s book is the man’s unwavering naivete, which, he says, is not evident in Roman Catholics (John DiIulio, for instance) who also served in the Bush administration. Evangelicals are innocents abroad in Washington.

There is something healthy about Kuo’s continuing enthusiasm and his refusal of jadedness, but it is striking that Protestant Evangelicals, who are supposed to have a healthy sense of sin, would be so undiscerning about politicians.

American Religion: RJ Rushdoony’s influence

Reviewing several recent books on the Christian Right in the current issue of First Things, Ross Douthat has this to say about Rushdoony: “What he has instead are the Christian Reconstructionists—the acolytes of the late R.J. Rushdoony—who are genuine theocrats, of a sort, and who also rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from figuring prominently in nearly all the anti-theocrat anthropologies, playing the same role that international communism played for right-wing paranoiacs in the 1950s: the puppet master working from the shadows and the hidden hand behind every secular setback.”

The books Douthat reviews are no doubt expressions of leftist paranoia, but still it seems to me that the leftists have a better sense of Rushdoony’s influence at the grass roots than Douthat does. No doubt no one at the Atlantic, where Douthat works, has been influenced by Rushdoony, but I daresay that if Douthat visited a home school convention, or examined a Christian school curriculum, or talked with a group of Christian political activists, he’d find Rushdoony’s work lurking everywhere, for good and for ill.

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